Risqruel Drath Is Way More Fun Than People Give Him Credit For

In the current Splinterlands meta, Eternal Tofu is without a doubt the most powerful summoner out there. That's fine in itself, one summoner has to be the strongest after all and it's not like you'll get an auto win just by running Eternal Tofu over any other summoner. There are still a lot of different viable strategies and if you are certain that an Eternal Tofu will be coming, you can usually build a great counter team against him.

One Summoner did suffer a bit more under Eternal Tofus rule than everybody else, though, and that is Risqruel Drath, better known as Darth Squirrel, the summoner created by @bulldog1205. If you take a look at Eternal Tofu and Darth Squirrel back to back, the issue becomes apparent rather quick:

Darth Squirrel provides your whole team with flying while Eternal Tofu gives snare. In this combination, this means that any monster on Eternal Tofus side is always going to hit any monster on Darth Squirrels side. No matter the speed difference, no matter if the monster has dodge, if there's blind applied, snare means it's an auto hit against flying monsters every single time. In other words, against Darth Squirrel, Eternal Tofu is providing your team with True Strike and as we already know from Byzantine Kittys reign, this is hands down one of the strongest abilities in the game.

Now a lot could be said about this fact alone, how it's not ideal design to have one summoner (that's already extremely strong) hard counter another summoner (that's already rather situational) and I'm sure the Splinterlands team is pretty aware of the mistake they made there just as well. Since this already has been discussed quite a bit, I want to instead focus on something completely different: Yes, Darth Squirrels has its issues, yes, it's one of the weaker summoners you can field, but damn, he's still a lot of fun to toy around with.

The reason for that is a little fact that seems to be less well known than one might think. One of the tactics Darth Squirrel offers you is to give Taunt and Redemption to one monster. And that's already the key here. It's to one monster, not to one your your monsters. In other words, you can assign taunt and redemption to an opposing monster if you want to do so. Now obviously giving redemption to the opponent is not that great, but giving taunt... well, that's a lot of fun. Just take a look at that battle right here

My opponent is running a beefy tank up front and backs that up with another rather tanky monster right behind him. Getting through both these guys is going to take a bit of effort and will provide the two glass cannon damage dealers in the back with ample time to go after my own tank. The rest of my team is rather squishy, so if my tank goes down too quick, the rest of the team isn't going to last very long. Luckily, I've brought Darth Squirrel. By giving taunt to Venka, my own backline is going to take her down before she even gets to attack a single time. The following redemption obviously isn't ideal, but I'd much rather take 6 times 1 damage to all my monsters than 7 damage to the face for one of my monsters. In fact, if Venka did get to attack twice she probably would have decimated my whole team, so taking her out right away was key to winning this one.

Here's another example of how to use taunt on your opponent:

This time, it's a mirror match. While @josieb decided to buff two of her own monsters with Impede and True Strike, I've taken a closer look at her lineup first. We both have a fast and beefy tank up front and a lot of damage behind that. Most interesting to me are the two monsters at her rear. Delya deals and absurd amount of damage herself while Ash Mirage debuffs the ranged attack of my team. So both of these are an issue for the battle and if I manage to remove either one early, I get a huge advantage for the rest of the fight.

Since Delya has that pesky dodge, I decided to give taunt to the Ash Mirage. Thanks to Ambush, Rush Townsend takes care of the Mirage before any other monster even gets to act, thus increasing the damage the rest of my team deals. They make quick work of her tank after that and in the end, I kill the whole opposing team without losing a single monster myself.

As you can see from these examples, by slapping taunt on an an opposing monster, you can often quickly take out a key part of the opposing game plan. Some times I go for the most squishy damage dealer on the opposing team, some times I go after the healer if I face a more sustain oriented team. Either way, by taking out that key monster, you can often completely change how the battle would turn out otherwise. You can even use that to go after a monster with camouflage! If your opponent is running Dr. Blight, it's all but guaranteed he'll long be gone before it would be his turn to act.

Obviously. this strategy has its limits. If there's already a taunting monster on the opposing team, your monsters are always going after the first monster with taunt. So if there's a taunter in the front, you'll have to take that one down first. This often negates the effect fully, as it's going to take you too long to go after the monster you applied taunt to. Also, relying on ranged monsters for the +1 damage buff Darth Squirrel brings, your teams are usually going to be rather squishy. So in other words, if you don't make quick work of the opponent, more often than not, you'll be outlasted in the end and even though you might get that early kill, in the end your monsters are just going to die too quickly. This, again, is especially an issue against Eternal Tofu teams. This +2 health combined with Scavenge and Triage usually is just too much for poor Darth Squirrel.

But anyway, I really love that taunt play and to me it's yet another reason why Splinterlands is such an awesome game. You can really make a difference if you use that tactic in a creative way!